Structural Characteristics and Radiative Properties of Tropical Cloud Clusters

Abstract

Abstract By identifying individual tropical cloud clusters in eight months of the International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project data, the size distribution, average cloud properties, and their variation with system size in tropical convective systems (CS) is examined. The geographic distribution of CS shows a concentration over land areas in the summer hemisphere with little seasonal variation except for the major shift of location into the summer hemisphere. When the tropics are considered as a whole or a region is considered over a whole season, CS of all sizes (from individual convective towers at 2–20 km to the largest mesoscale systems at 200–2000 km) form a continuous size distribution where the area covered by the clouds in each size range is approximately the same. Land CS show a small excess of the smallest CS and a small deficit of the largest CS in comparison to ocean CS. Average CS cloud properties suggest two major cloud types: one with lower cloud-top pressures and much higher optical th...